With eviction imminent, Albany’s shoreline shantytown residents plead to be left alone

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Albany Bulb resident Amber Whitson talks about the situation with the city as both sides near an announced October eviction date for the 70 or so residents encamped on the former landfill site in Albany, Calif., on Tuesday, Sept. 3, 2013. (Kristopher Skinner/Bay Area News Group)

Standing in her backyard at the Albany Bulb, resident Amber Whitson talks about the situation with the city as both sides near an announced October eviction date for the 70 or so residents encamped on the former landfill site in Albany, Calif., on Tuesday, Sept. 3, 2013. (Kristopher Skinner/Bay Area News Group)

Standing in the Albany Bulb visitors center, resident Amber Whitson talks about the situation with the city as both sides near an announced October eviction date for the 70 or so residents encamped on the former landfill site in Albany, Calif., on Tuesday, Sept. 3, 2013. (Kristopher Skinner/Bay Area News Group)

ALBANY — They have one of the finest panoramic views of the San Francisco Bay, but their home is a fragile shantytown built of tarp, pallets, rebar and concrete blocks salvaged from the old junkyard beneath them.

Now, with their shoreline tent city threatened with expulsion, more than 60 homeless residents who live atop the former Albany Bulb landfill marched on Tuesday evening from their camp to City Hall to protest a planned October eviction.

But their protest fell on deaf ears.

On a 4-1 vote, the Albany City Council reaffirmed its May 6 decision to enforce a no camping ordinance, spending nearly two hours on the subject. The council chambers were overflowing, with many residents of the Bulb and their supporters speaking against enforcing the ordinance while others favored moving forward with plans to turn the land into the McLaughlin Eastshore State Park.

“I think they should let us remain out here. We’re not bothering anyone,” said Stephanie Ringstad, who has lived for five years in a makeshift home nestled under pine and juniper trees.

If forced out, “we wouldn’t know what to do,” Ringstad said. “We’re as ingrained as a family.”

A city that has long tolerated homeless on “The Bulb,” which juts into the bay behind the Golden Gate Fields racetrack, is finally cracking down as it prepares to transform the land into a centerpiece of the long-planned McLaughlin Eastshore State Park. Beginning in October, police are on orders to enforce an overnight camping ban.

“The campers have to leave. It’s supposed to be a public park,” said Robert Cheasty, president of Citizens for East Shore Parks and a former Albany mayor.

His group has been working since the 1980s to create a belt of open space along the East Bay shoreline.

“Now it’s just overburdened. There’s a ton of people” who have taken over the future parkland, Cheasty said. “Homeless people need to be re-integrated into society, not be shunted off, even if it’s of their own choice.”

The Albany City Council voted unanimously in May to clear the park of its longtime inhabitants and transfer the land to the oversight of the East Bay Regional Park District. At the same time, the city contracted with the nonprofit Berkeley Food and Housing Project to find the campers permanent housing nearby. Months later, and with the eviction now imminent, only a handful have moved out.

For years, the remote Bulb was “where the homeless get told to go,” said 32-year-old resident Amber Whitson, a fast-talking advocate who has schooled herself in the minutiae of municipal government in a quest to let the campers stay.

“We have been exiled out here, and we’ve grown happy being exiles out here,” she said.

Whitson was homeless in downtown Berkeley for many years before she discovered the Bulb in 2006 and found in it a peaceful refuge. There were 15 people then, following previous city attempts — in 1999 and 2006 — to clear out the settlement and a 2003 documentary, “Bums’ Paradise,” that made the shantytown famous.

Now 62 people call The Bulb home, down from a high of 70, according to a survey the residents recently conducted on their own. Living with them are 25 dogs, nine cats and six kittens.

More than half The Bulb’s residents have no income; others have jobs or some kind of cash assistance from the government or family members. The youngest is 21 years old. Many are in their 50s or early 60s. More than 20 residents “are able-bodied and want to work,” Whitson said.

Whitson and her boyfriend wake up to a gorgeous view of the Golden Gate Bridge, framed by San Francisco and Mt. Tamalpais. Their bedroom is sheltered from the bay winds by a low-hanging tree canopy, and their backyard is a trove of salvaged keepsakes: World War II dog tags, marbles, and a Buddha head.

Like many of the Bulb homes, theirs is hidden from view. Others are hard to miss. One multistoried encampment rising on a bluff overlooking a diked lagoon is a mansion of pallets — a display of ostentation that has annoyed the occupant’s neighbors.

The elaborate shantytown and the art installations that surround it draw mixed feelings from nearby residents of what campers call “contiguous Albany,” the compact and middle-class city of about 18,000 people on the other side of Interstate 80.

Alameda County Housing Director Linda Gardner calls the Albany Bulb one of the “more entrenched encampments” in a populous county where more than 4,000 people are homeless on any given day, but said “there’s also been a really heartwarming response from citizens of Albany. They acknowledge that they’re part of their community.”

Berkeley couple Nate Brownlow and Andrea DeJarlais walk the Albany Bulb at least four times a week, often with their dog and two young children, and say they have never had trouble with the people who live there.

“I like the Bulb. It should stay the way it is,” Brownlow said. “It’s a little wild and unkempt, … but they have their own community there and disrupting them will create a bigger problem.”

Still, there is nothing romantic about The Bulb to longtime resident Robert Wharton, 55, a former auto mechanic and San Lorenzo native who first moved into the wind-swept peninsula two decades ago after bouts with poverty and mental illness.

“A lot of people out here think this is going to last forever. I know it’s not,” he said.

Wharton would rather be living in an apartment that his 11-year-old daughter could visit. He is in talks with social workers looking to find him a new home.

“I am willing to take whatever I can get, but they’re not offering very much,” Wharton said. “If they kick me out of here, I guess I’ll go to sleep in front of City Hall.”

Correspondent Damin Esper contributed to this story. Contact Matt O’Brien at 510-208-6429. Follow him at Twitter.com/Mattoyeah.

Researchers said Sunday the mass die-off occurred because unusually large amounts of sea ice forced penguin parents to travel farther in search of food for their young. By the time they returned, only two out of thousands of chicks had survived.